Because Slow is Faster and Fast is Merely Exhausting!

The Mightier Pen

They say the pen is mightier than the sword. In times like these, when airports where my children were supposed to be, blow up thirty-six hours prior to their arrival, I am apt to take pen to paper to make sense of it all. Only it is senseless to try to make sense of something so incredibly violent, deadly, disruptive and hateful. While there is power in Slow, there is something so incredibly powerless about ambush, anger and anxiety. It wraps its grip around our necks, daring us to breathe.

And I dare to breathe.

I dare to claim, even in moments like this one, that 98% of people are good. That 22,000 individuals who have committed themselves to hating others, cannot stop me from loving, living and laughing. They cannot stop me from seeing my family. They cannot stop me from believing in the power of prayer, the Universe and That Which is Good. In everyone.

Terrorists are pawns. They execute orders from others who are kept out of harm’s way. They are driven — in brain-washed insanity – to take their own lives and those of others around them. They truly believe they will be rewarded. Oh, they will be rewarded! With yet another life, coming back this time as perhaps an ant or a microorganism. And they get to come back over and over again. They get to start anew until one day they get it right.

I told my children that if anything ever happened to them as they glide through European borders — or anywhere in this world — that I would hate that person, that forgiveness would not come easy and that I would need a lot of people to raise that threshold of inhibition within me not to lash out in kind. But that the only way our world can get better is — through our own extreme efforts — to fight fire with water.

It is the only way. And so I dare to breathe. I dare to live. I dare to love. Beyond borders. Beyond terrorists. To celebrate the 98%.

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Christine Louise Hohlbaum is a recovering speedaholic and the author of The Power of Slow. She works as a professional storyteller (PR, translations, books) from the home she shares with her children in Freiburg, Germany.